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Summary:

Through a series of provocative conversations, Frederick Luis Aldama and Herbert Lindenberger, who have written widely on literature, film, music, and art, locate a place for the discomforting and the often painfully unpleasant within aesthetics. The conversational format allows them to travel informally across many centuries and many art forms. They have much to tell one another about the arts since the advent of modernism soon after 1900-the nontonal music, for example, of the Second Vienna School, the chance-directed music and dance of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, the in-your-faceness of such diverse visual artists as Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, and Damien Hirst. They demonstrate as well a long tradition of discomforting art stretching back many centuries, for example, in the Last Judgments of innumerable Renaissance painters, in Goya's so-called "black" paintings, in Wagner's Tristan chord, and in the subtexts of Shakespearean works such as King Lear and Othelloe. This book is addressed at once to scholars of literature, art history, musicology, and cinema. Although its conversational format eschews the standard conventions of scholarly argument, it provides original insights both into particular art forms and into individual works within these forms. Among other matters, it demonstrates how recent work in neuroscience may provide insights in the ways that consumers process difficult and discomforting works of art. The book also contributes to current aesthetic theory by charting the dialogue that goes on-especially in aesthetically challenging works- between creator, artifact, and consumer.

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Prologue : scratching at the surface of discomfort
• Digging deeper at a possible theory for an aesthetics of discomfort
• Bottoms up
• Awkward spaces
• Noise to the ears
• Retchful art
• Revolting reels
• Epilogue : now That's disquieting!

Author/Creator:

Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969- , author

Contributors:

Lindenberger, Herbert, 1929-2018 , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Aesthetics of discomfort: conversations on disquieting art [by Aldama, F.L.]

Subjects:

Art — Aesthetics

Aesthetics

Art

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description based on: Print version record.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 204 pages)

Digital Characteristics:

text file

Call Numbers:

N70 .A433 2016eb

ISBNs:

9780472121632 (electronic bk.)
0472121634 (electronic bk.)
9780472073009 (hardcover, alk. paper) [Invalid]
0472073001 (hardcover, alk. paper) [Invalid]
9780472053001 (paperback, alk. paper) [Invalid]
0472053000 (paperback, alk. paper) [Invalid]

OCLC Numbers:

937392274